I’m back in Washington and pretty much recovered from traveling to and from Libya for a conference on that country’s terrorist rehabilitation program. I should note that the trip would have been impossible until 2006, when the United States restored diplomatic relations with Libya after a 27-year break and following a two-and-a-half year diplomatic process. While the trip itself felt like an extended advertisement for Libya’s heir apparent, Saif al-Islam Qaddafi, it’s worth noting that the terrorists who have gone through Libya’s rehabilitation program don’t seem to have de-radicalized so much as they have simply made a deal with the Libyan government not to fight against Tripoli anymore. There was no categorical renunciation of violence, rather one limited to a renunciation of violence against the Qaddafi regime and the Libyan state.

For one, the religious scholar who oversees the rehabilitation program, Sheikh Ali Salabi, evaded questions from the assembled group of foreign scholars and think-tankers about the new religious views he had promoted among militants on the permissibility of fighting against the United States or any other “occupier” in Iraq, Afghanistan, or elsewhere.

Second, for the most part, the militants we were able to talk to did, in fact, have conditions that would lead them to take up violence against the Libyan state again. Combined with Salabi’s evasions on the question of fighting elsewhere and their own familiar criticisms of U.S. policy in the Middle East, I got the impression that these militants haven’t so much as made some sort of intellectual conversion into renouncing violence as a method of political change as they have constructed an intellectual edifice justifying a deal with the Libyan government.

This perception seemed to be confirmed by the rambling lecture given us by the head of Libya’s internal security organization, where he claimed that the militants had recognized the error of their interpretation of Islam and the truth of Qaddafi’s own interpretation. Also included in the security chief’s remarks were several gratuitous attacks on secularism, as well as bizarre claims that there were no “infidels” in Libya and that Libya had ideal religious freedom since it is governed by Qaddafi’s correct interpretation of Islam.

There’s a certain irony to the way the Libyans presented their claims to fronting a successful terrorist rehabilitation program – they were employing the very means the terrorists used to justify violence against the regime. That is, the presenters claimed that the group had an incorrect and false interpretation of Islam – which is exactly what the militant group claimed of the Libyan government to justify rebelling against it. So the program remains stuck in a narrow and futile debate of what is or is not “true Islam.”

This view was confirmed, to me at least, by the press conference marking the release of some 200-plus prisoners from Libyan prisons we were trucked off to following the security chief’s presentation. Both Saif al-Islam Qaddafi’s opening remarks and the militants’ were conducted in the same narrow space of religion, and the militants included some remarks on the Danish Mohammad cartoon controversy that could only be interpreted as blackmail – i.e., don’t offend us or we’ll start blowing things up again.

Combined, these remarks signaled to me a narrowing of the ideological distance between the regime and the militants. It’d be wrong to say the regime is “giving in” in some sense to the religious ideology of the militants since Qaddafi has always incorporated religion into his eccentric and idiosyncratic ideology, but I did get the sense both the government and militants were determined to keep acceptable political discourse in the narrow confines of religion.

Finally, the next day we went to the Libyan prison where a large number of these prisoners were being held to witness their release. Of the 200-plus prisoners released, an official told us, some 85 had been detained either in Iraq or in transit to fight there. Combined with the previous day’s experiences and evasiveness we received on the question of Libyans fighting abroad, I came to the conclusion that these prisoners haven’t been de-radicalized at all; rather, they have simply been induced by means unknown to give up (at least for now) violence in Libya and against the Qaddafi regime. (As Human Rights Watch noted, a number of the prisoners released had been held arbitrarily by the Libyan regime even after formal acquittal by the court system.) They still hold radical political views but have decided, temporarily at least, not to implement those views by violence domestically.

Labeling this rehabilitation program a “deradicalization” program is a misnomer that plays upon the faulty and quite frankly bigoted division of people of Muslim religious background into “radicals” (people who blow stuff up) and “moderates” (people who don’t blow stuff up). Either way, if you’re born into a Muslim religious background, this view implies, we view you as intrinsically and essentially conservative and concerned above all else with your presumed religion.

This view is reactionary, and cedes the political playing field to religious conservatives and regional dictators. Neither the United States nor progressives should make such a concession to the agendas of these players.

The Center for Community Change’s Fair Immigration Reform Movement (FIRM) released a statement this afternoon announcing that leaders from their group met with Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele to discuss the future of comprehensive immigration reform in the Republican Party. According to FIRM, advocates left the meeting with a “commitment from Steele to work with Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and the party’s leadership to enlist another Republican senator’s support for comprehensive and bipartisan immigration reform.” The Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights (ICIRR) was one of the groups represented at the meeting and issued a separate release:

Chairman Steele understands the short- and long-term importance of the immigrant vote to the Republican Party. He expressed support for bipartisan, holistic immigration reform, and understood the need for the party to tone down the anti-immigrant rhetoric in the debate. He agreed to speak today with U.S. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) to see how he could help move immigration reform forward…We are grateful for the time Chairman Steele spent with us today—but we will judge the value of this meeting based on what the Republican Party actually does on immigration reform.

Marissa Graciosa, FIRM’s director, was more blunt. “Basically, the leaders outed the Republican strategy of trying to obstruct comprehensive immigration reform by blaming Obama,” Graciosa told Wonk Room. “They made it clear that we’re not going to let a Party who doesn’t lift a finger off the hook,” said Graciosa. Graciosa also indicated that the groups expect the RNC to issue a statement to its members in support of immigration reform.

The fact that Steele even expressed interest in pursuing immigration reform represents a welcomed turnaround. In 2007, Steele absurdly opposed giving driver’s licenses to undocumented immigrants on the basis that they might register to vote. He also referred to the 2007 immigration bill as “amnesty” and affirmed in 2008 that there would be no change in the Republican Party’s enforcement-only immigration approach.

Steele’s cooperation could also signal a possible change in the RNC’s official policy. The 2008 RNC platform offered enforcement-only solutions and stated that the RNC opposed “en masse legalizations.” Since an earned path to legalization for the majority of the nation’s undocumented population is a central tenet of comprehensive immigration reform, getting an RNC chairman on-board is a critical step forward on the issue as a whole.

However, as ICIRR pointed out in its press release, actions speak louder than words. Currently, Graham has left immigration reform at the feet of the Obama administration and indicated that it’s up to the White House to do the “heavy-lifting.” However, in the end, it’s up to Congress to deliver the votes. Immigration reform has always demanded bipartisanship and that means Graham, Steele, and other GOP leaders are going to have to do some heavy lifting themselves if they are truly committed to the issue. Also, given the fact that Steele’s relationship with Republican leaders in Congress is reportedly “not good at all,” it’s mostly up to Graham to stop finger-pointing and start getting members of his own Party to come around.

President Barack Obama has made comprehensive energy reform a key issue of his presidency, with massive investments in clean energy, initial efforts to confront climate change, and a commitment to “ending our addiction to foreign oil.” Today, Obama announced a sweeping new offshore drilling policy, opening “vast expanses of water along the Atlantic coastline, the eastern Gulf of Mexico and the north coast of Alaska to oil and natural gas drilling” for the first time. This plan would also restore the ban on drilling in Alaska’s Bristol Bay and the West Coast. White House officials “pitched the changes as ways to reduce U.S. reliance on foreign oil and create jobs,” the Associated Press reports. For years, however, Obama has correctly explained that new offshore drilling would do nothing to “reduce U.S. reliance on foreign oil”:

“The days of running a 21st century economy on a 20th century fossil fuel are numbered – and we need to realize that before it’s too late.”

“The truth is, an oil future is not a secure future for America.”

“We could open up every square inch of America to drilling and we still wouldn’t even make a dent in our oil dependency.” 9/15/05

“It would be nice if we could produce our way out of this problem, but it’s just not possible.” 2/28/06

“Instead of making tough political decisions about how to reduce our insatiable demand for oil, this bill continues to lull the American people into thinking that we can drill our way out of our energy problems. ” 8/1/06

“Now is the time to end this addiction, and to understand that drilling is a stop-gap measure, not a long-term solution. Not even close.” 8/28/08

This expansion in offshore drilling leases, the Energy Information Administration has found, will have no effect on gas prices or dependence on foreign oil. Nor will it increase jobs, as oil companies aren’t really interested in new drilling — they are already sitting on existing leases instead of drilling them, in order to inflate their bottom lines by claiming the value of leased oil reserves as an asset. Furthermore, a Center for American Progress study has found that money that goes into the oil sector instead of the clean energy economy means a net loss of 14 jobs per million dollars.

In the beginning of August 2008, as Newt Gingrich’s American Solutions for Winning the Future (ASWF) “Drill Here, Drill Now” campaign overlapped the presidential campaign, and oil and gas prices were skyrocketing to record levels, Obama dropped his “blanket opposition to expanded offshore drilling,” saying that he would be willing “to compromise in terms of a careful, well thought-out drilling strategy that was carefully circumscribed to avoid significant environmental damage” in order to get Republican votes for comprehensive climate and energy reform.

In 2005 and 2006, Obama talked about the “tough decisions” of “how to reduce our insatiable demand for oil” and “investing in more hybrids and renewable energy sources, raising CAFE standards and helping our auto industry transition to a fuel-efficient future,” instead of drilling. In his first year in office, Obama made tremendous down payments on the clean-energy transition, the cash-for-clunkers program, and ninety billion dollars of Recovery Act funds for hybrid cars, efficiency, and renewable energy technologies, and momentous new CAFE standards that will save 1.8 billion barrels of oil demand. That accomplished, Obama took a step back, saying in his 2010 State of the Union speech that “clean energy jobs” means “making tough decisions about opening new offshore areas for oil and gas development.” America’s oil addiction can only be broken with comprehensive climate legislation that puts a real cap on carbon pollution.

Conservatives are treating the announcement with disdain — Gingrich’s ASWF said the president’s plan “is likely to be an attempt by Obama to seduce the public (into) believing that he will do something in the future on offshore drilling,” but amounts to little more than window-dressing. Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity vice president Phil Kerpen commented that “the idea that this is a big concession in exchange for which Congress should jumpstart climate legislation is ridiculous.”

In a speech on the Senate floor in November, Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) alarmingly accused the Obama administration of failing to plan for the expiration of the original START treaty, which was due to expire on Dec. 5.

I urge my colleagues to consider what will happen on December 6, the day after the expiration of that agreement. For the first time in 15 years, an extensive set of verification, notification, elimination and other confidence building measures will expire. The U.S. will lose a significant source of information that has allowed it to have confidence in its ability to understand Russian strategic nuclear forces… The paramount object of this treaty should have been to extend the verification measure of the 1991 Agreement. But, it appears that the administration’s object was to lock in significant nuclear weapons cuts.

Kyl’s accusations were ultimately proven to be entirely off-base, as the Administration reached an agreement with the Russians to extend most of the verification and monitoring measures of Ronald Reagan’s original START treaty until a new treaty could be ratified.

But Kyl’s alarmism at the prospect of the loss of verification measures deserves to be highlighted. Should he and his Republican colleagues in the Senate work kill the treaty during the ratification process, all of Kyl’s warnings about the implications of the loss of the START verification system would in fact become a reality. The failure to ratify the new START treaty would significantly upset nuclear stability by eroding trust between the two countries — potentially spawning a new nuclear arms race, as Kyl himself argued. This would, as a result, upset the non-proliferation regime and severely upset nuclear stability around the globe. In short, if the US doesn’t ratify a treaty that largely maintains the nuclear status quo between the US and Russia, the whole nuclear non-proliferation regime, as well as US-Russian relations, could unravel.

The Kyl of November 2009 was right about the possibly dangerous and disastrous implications of START not existing. But the Kyl of 2010 seems to have forgotten the warnings made by Kyl of 2009.

While Kyl has not said that he would oppose the treaty, he and has staff have now grasped onto a petty and inconsequential issue — one that the administration has no control over and has no practical impact — as grounds for opposing the treaty. The issue is over whether Russia will unilaterally issue a statement following the START agreement that says that they will withdraw from the treaty should they feel that missile defense upsets “strategic stability.” Kyl, as well as the Wall Street Journal, are desperately trying to claim that this declaration will enable Russia will to hold us hostage by threatening missile defense. But this is a farcical argument. All treaties contain provisions that give countries the right to withdraw from a treaty for whatever reason they see fit. Therefore, it simply doesn’t matter if the Russians write anything down, since written or not they could still always withdraw from the treaty if they feel missile defense has undercut them. As former Ambassador to the Ukraine and Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution Steven Pifer noted:

Who cares? … There is a supreme interest withdrawal clause that goes back to the original START treaty and can be invoked for any reason by either side so long as they provide six months’ notice.

Michael Krepon at Arms Control Wonk goes further, noting that if successful, Kyl will be giving Russians a victory on missile defense:

Throwing mud against the wall and seeing what sticks is a time-honored approach to messing up treaty ratification… If the mud sticks in this instance, Senators will be sending a very unfortunate message abroad – that the United States of America can be spooked by unilateral statements that have no legal or practical effect. They will also be giving unintended credence to the canard that Moscow has veto rights over U.S. ballistic missile defense programs.

Kyl’s claims that such a statement is reason enough to kill the treaty, is either willfully ignorant of how treaties work or he is simply looking for an excuse to oppose it. The Kyl of 2010 needs to be reminded of the arguments made by Kyl of 2009.

Not that anyone is surprised by irresponsible pro-war journalism from the Washington Times, but yesterday’s Bill Gertz story — run under a headline screaming “CIA: IRAN CAPABLE OF PRODUCING NUKES” — was a particularly vivid shade of yellow. Gertz wrote that “Iran is poised to begin producing nuclear weapons after its uranium program expansion in 2009, even though it has had problems with thousands of its centrifuges, according to a newly released CIA report.”

“Iran continues to develop a range of capabilities that could be applied to producing nuclear weapons, if a decision is made to do so,” the annual report to Congress states.

A U.S. official involved in countering weapons proliferation said the Iranians are “keeping the door open to the possibility of building a nuclear weapon.”

Is this new or newsworthy? No, and not particularly. Gertz’s attempt to sex up the CIA’s report (pdf) through the clever deployment of the phrase “poised to begin…” notwithstanding, the report’s conclusions are precisely the same as that contained in the intelligence community’s annual threat assessment (pdf), delivered by DNI Dennis Blair to Congress in February:

We continue to assess Iran is keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons in part by developing various nuclear capabilities that bring it closer to being able to produce such weapons, should it choose to do so. We do not know, however, if Iran will eventually decide to build nuclear weapons.

Indeed, a few grafs down Gertz himself acknowledges that the report “reflects the published conclusion of a controversial 2007 National Intelligence Estimate that stated Iran had halted work on nuclear weapons in 2003.” How could the report reflect those conclusions while at the same time assert that Iran is both “capable” of producing nuclear weapons, and “poised” to do so? Simple: It couldn’t.

While the upcoming National Intelligence Estimate on Iran is expected to revise some of conclusions of the 2007 NIE, today’s news that the U.S. has had custody since last June of a key Iranian nuclear scientist suggests that those revisions might be less than the 180 degree reversal that some conservatives are hoping for. ABC reports that the scientist, Shahram Amiri “has been extensively debriefed since his defection by the CIA, according to the people briefed on the situation. They say Amiri helped to confirm U.S. intelligence assessments about the Iranian nuclear program.”

The New York Times reported in January that President Obama, who deeply believes banning gay men and women from serving openly in the military is “just wrong,” was finally spurred to push for repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell by the realization that “if he did not change the policy, his administration would be forced to defend publicly the constitutionality of a law he had long opposed.”

Unfortunately, that’s exactly what the Justice Department is doing, defending the constitutionality of DADT against a lawsuit filed by the Log Cabin Republicans in 2004. This brief, submitted yesterday, notes that Congress is considering repealing the policy, but quotes “from retired Gen. Colin Powell’s statements nearly two decades ago in favor of the gays-in-the-military ban without noting that Powell has since reversed himself on the issue.” The brief also regurgitates numerous conservative talking points:

- General Colin Powell similarly testified that, “[t]o win wars, we create cohesive teams of warriors who will bond so tightly that they are prepared to go into battle and give their lives if necessary for the accomplishment of the mission and for the cohesion of the group and for their individual buddies.” Id. Congress found that unit cohesion is improved by reducing or eliminating the potential for sexual tension to distract the members of the unit, and by protecting the personal privacy of service members.

- General Powell testified that homosexual conduct in units “involves matters of privacy and human sexuality that, . . . if allowed to exist openly in the military, would affect the cohesion and well-being of the force.”…He further testified that “it would be prejudicial to good order and discipline” if the military required heterosexuals and persons who demonstrate that they do or are likely to engage in homosexual acts “to share the most private facilities together,” id. at 283, and that “[c]ohesion is strengthened or weakened in the intimate living arrangements we force upon our people.

- Among other things, Congress determined that the statute was necessary because “[t]he presence in the Armed Forces of persons who demonstrate a propensity or intent to engage in homosexual acts would create an unacceptable risk to the high standards of morale, good order and discipline, and unit cohesion that are the essence of military capability.

Gen. Collin Powell officially announced his opposition to DADT back in February, noting that “attitudes and circumstances have changed.” Yet DOJ continues to cite his outdated views to justify a policy that the government is supposed to be unraveling.

All this puts Obama and repeal advocates in a strange position. It’s difficult to push for reform and push back against supporters of the policy when the federal government is using their arguments to defend it. If anything will motivate the president and his national security team to begin working directly with Congress to get repeal legislation into this year’s defense authorization bill, this is it.

The Obama administration and many congressional Democrats are pushing to create a strong Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA) that will be able to “effectively enforce rules designed to protect consumers of mortgages, credit cards and other financial products.” Such legislation has already passed the House. However, now, Senate Republicans and their allies in the financial industry are trying to block these efforts by weakening the legislation in every way they can. House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) has even urged bankers to stand up for themselves against “little punk staffers” on Capitol Hill and lobby against financial reform.

Advocates for reform now have a powerful ally on their side: the Pentagon. On Feb. 26, Undersecretary of Defense Clifford Stanley wrote to the Treasury Department and advocated a strong CFPA, noting that military families are often the targets of unscrupulous financial practices:

The Department of Defense would welcome and encourage CFPA protections provided to Service members and their families with regard to unscrupulous automobile sales and financing practices, provided such protections would not limit access to legitimate products. While each Military Service includes car buying and financial classes as part of its normal financial educational curriculum, there are still documented cases of Service members falling victim to predatory practices and prohibitively expensive products. [...]

We recognize Service members and their families are under increasing stress. When we have asked in surveys about the causes, Service members responded that finances were second only behind work and career concerns and ahead of deployments, health, life events, family relationships, and war/hostilities.

Last week, Pentagon officials also met with Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner about the CFPA. “DOD firmly believes that the financial readiness of their troops and families equates to mission readiness and anything that we can do to help our families be financially ready, we will support the family and the mission,” said avid Julian, the director of the Defense Department’s Office of Personal Finance.

Predatory lenders have long targeted military families. In 2006, the AP found that thousands of U.S. servicemembers were “being barred from overseas duty because they are so deep in debt that they are considered security risks.” Military officials blamed the problem, in part, on “high interest rates at payday lending businesses, many of which are clustered outside bases around the country.” That same year, President Bush signed legislation limiting the interest rate on payday loans for military families.

An area of particular concern now is shady automobile lending. In a survey of 659 military financial managers, counselors legal assistance officers, 72 percent of them said that they “had counseled Service members in the past six months” about tactics such as “bait and switch” financing, falsification of loan applications or documents, and other abusive practices in auto financing. Currently, however, auto dealers don’t have to follow the same rules as community banks and credit unions.

Unfortunately, in October, the House Financial Services Committee approved an amendment that would “exempt auto financing from independent dealers” from CFPA oversight. (Democratic Chairman Barney Frank opposed the measure.) If Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN) gets his way, payday lenders will also be exempt.

Yesterday, former CNN anchor Lou Dobbs appeared on Univision’s Al Punto with Jorge Ramos. Throughout the interview, Ramos sought to hold Dobbs accountable for the misinformation about immigrants that he promoted on his show while it was still on the air. As he has done in a series of interviews since leaving CNN, Dobbs defiantly refused to admit to any factual inaccuracies or misleading reporting on his behalf. Quite the contrary, Dobbs lashed out at Ramos for dwelling on the past and accused him of spreading propaganda:

DOBBS: Why are you invested in seven years ago rather than the present or the future?

RAMOS: Because many of the things that you said —

DOBBS: — Why aren’t you interested in what I’m saying now? [...] You know those things. Why aren’t you talking about that aspect of what I’ve been saying? Why are you trying to carry out some sort of propagandist culdesac here. [...] I don’t see the point, I don’t see the point, you see…Please please listen to me Jorge please, please, please…You want to debate, I want to have a conversation, do you want to debate about something that matters?…I want to talk to Jorge Ramos, I don’t need you to be a mouthpiece for other points of views. I didn’t bring other points of views here to you, I bring you mine, bring me yours.

RAMOS: These are my questions.

Watch it:

However, for the most part, Ramos raised valid issues. Ramos confronted Dobbs about a report in which Dobbs claimed that immigrants are “clogging up the federal prison system,” which Ramos interpreted as a suggestion that undocumented immigrants “were increasing the crime rate.” Dobbs blasted Ramos for making an “interesting logical connection” and affirmed that, at the time, one-third, or 27 percent, of prison inmates were non-citizens. Yet Dobbs’ claim was debunked long ago by Justice Department figures which show that about 6 percent of the state and federal prison population are non-citizens. Dobbs also boasted to Ramos that, this past summer, he pledged never to refer to undocumented immigrants as “illegal aliens” ever again. He didn’t mention that just two months later he employed the term “illegal alien” while decrying the “Latinization” of the country.

To Dobbs credit, he did admit that he made in error in reporting that immigrants were responsible for 7,000 new cases of leprosy in the U.S. Ramos and Dobbs also spent an extended period of time arguing about whether there are 10.8 million or 20 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S. Though most studies show the figure is closer to the estimates Ramos cited — 10.8 to 12 million — in 2005, Bear Stearns analysts suggested that the number is closer to 20 million, as Dobbs maintained.

Nonetheless, Dobbs seems to miss the point that, for the millions of Latinos who were in some way affected by his slanderous reporting, the past matters a lot. It matters because Dobbs helped foster the xenophobic and isolationist instincts that fueled successful opposition to two immigration reform bills which contained provisions very similar to the solutions he now claims to support. It also matters because Dobbs’ “shrill anti-immigration reform commentaries” have been found to “correlate closely with the increase in hate crimes against Hispanics.”

Ramos informed Dobbs that he is probably “one of the most hated people within the Hispanic community.” Dobbs responded that that’s because the “Hispanic community doesn’t know me.” “Thanks to your efforts, they’re gonna get to know me,” Dobbs confidently told Ramos after having responded to most of Ramos’ questions with hostility and personal attacks towards one of the Latino community’s most revered reporters. Ramos also happens to be an eight-time Emmy Award winner and an immigrant from Mexico.

California gubernatorial candidate Steve Poizner (R-CA) has been pulling out every stop to present himself as a conservative immigration hawk and convince California voters that his opponent, former eBay chief executive Meg Whitman (R-CA), is “no real Republican.” His most recent effort consists of a television ad which alleges that, by supporting a path to legalization that would require undocumented immigrants to go to the back of the line, pay a fine, and learn English, Whitman and President Obama both support a policy of “amnesty.” Watch it:

Poziner’s research team may have missed Whitman affirmatively declaring herself “100 percent against amnesty, no exceptions.” They also may want to look “amnesty” up in the dictionary. The term implies that someone is pardoned for his or her crimes without penalty or acknowledgement of wrongdoing. Both President Obama and Whitman have stated that they support a tough and earned path to legalization for undocumented immigrants, but that’s not amnesty. For that matter, Whitman also shares a similar view with many conservative leaders including Karl Rove, Newt Gingrich, Grover Norquist, former President George W. Bush, and even tea party strategist Dick Armey.

Tony Quinn, a GOP political commentator, has described Poizner’s anti-immigrant race baiting as “political suicide”:

California in 2010 is not Alabama in 1958. For one thing, immigration ranks low on the GOP issue totem pole, well behind taxes, bad schools, poor roads and the mad hatter state budget mess. Immigration into California has slowed in the past decade because of the poor economy, making immigrants less of a target. And California voters don’t believe the politicians will do anything about it anyway.

But Poizner has accomplished one thing; he’s made himself unelectable in November, and further damaged his own party. [...] Poizner’s done; it’s time to stick a fork in him, and business and responsible Republicans ought to lead the way.

As of 2007, 43.6% of immigrants (or 4.4 million people) in California were naturalized U.S. citizens who can vote. Latinos meanwhile comprised 21.4% of California voters in the 2008 elections, and Asians 9.7%. Meanwhile, Quinn also points out that white voters are “the most liberal voters in California.”

A businessman like Poizner should also be sensitive to the fact that California could risk losing $164.2 billion in expenditures, $72.9 billion in economic output, and approximately 717,000 jobs if it removed all of its undocumented immigrants. A study by the University of Southern California found that putting California’s 1.8 million undocumented Latino immigrants on a path to legalization would generate $16 billion annually.

In an interview published today in the Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronot, Moshe Ya’alon — Israel’s Vice Prime Minister, Minister of Strategic Affairs, and a close adviser of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu — reveals that the lame efforts to resume the negotiations with the Palestinians are just “maneuvers” by the Netanyahu administration. Ya’alon’s comments explain that the gestures made by Netanyahu — from the qualified endorsement of the two-state solution to the decision to partially and temporarily freeze construction in the settlements — are all strategically intended to allow for greater settlement expansion in the future.

“And I say so out of knowledge,” Ya’alon told Yediot. “Nobody in the forum of seven [senior cabinet ministers] thinks that we can reach an agreement with the Palestinians.” Yediot Ahronot reports (print version, translated from Hebrew):

Q: So why all these games of make-believe negotiations? It’s possible to announce that we will not reach an agreement, and that is all.

YA’ALON: Because in the political establishment there are pressures. Peace Now from within and other elements from without. So you have to maneuver. But what I’m saying now has to be given over to the Americans, and I hope that they will understand.

Some of what we have to do is maneuver with the American administration and the European establishment, which are also nourished by Israeli elements, which create the illusion that an agreement can be reached.

Ya’alon disclosed that Netanyahu has made clear that he intends to increase settlement activity as soon as the freeze expires. “The prime minister reiterates all the time,” Ya’alon said, “and also brought a decision to the security cabinet that says clearly, that immediately after the freeze, we will continue to build in Judea and Samaria as we did before.”

Q: Will we evacuate settlements in the end?

YA’ALON: I do not accept that. What has happened to us in recent years obligates us to stop with everything connected to withdrawal.

The Netanyahu administration’s refusal to offer any compromise on settlement expansion in Jerusalem so angered President Obama that the president “walked out of his meeting” with the Prime Minister. The Netanyahu camp is huddling for discussions today, reportedly considering how to respond to Obama’s demands. It remains to be seen whether they will offer genuine accommodation or just more “maneuvers.”

(Hebrew translation provided by Americans for Peace Now.)

Recently, many within the conservative movement have been struggling to bridge the divide on immigration which exists among them. While many right-wingers continue to pound on immigrants, conservative strategists have warned against alienating the powerful Latino vote and have started advising the Republican Party to tone down its rhetoric. Tea party darling and Fox News host Glenn Beck seems torn on the issue as well.

Beck has long joined media personalities like Bill O’Reilly and Lou Dobbs in perpetuating anti-immigrant myths and fear-mongering. However, last night, Beck announced on his show that he wholeheartedly supports immigrants who come through the “front door” and admitted that he likes them more than “most Americans”:

I have no problem with immigrants. In fact, I like immigrants much more than I like most Americans quite frankly because they respect our country, they understand our country, they are still excited about our country. These people — I would go in boat loads to Ellis Island and be like “come on in!’ We need an Ellis Island, but you come through the front door. Bring us your energy, your enthusiasm, you ideas, the richness of your culture — as long as you’re excited about ours. [...]

People from all over the world come here for freedom and opportunity. And If we don’t have immigrants who love this country, we’re gonna run out of people who love this country…We need people who understand us and have seen our glory from the distance. And from their own corrupt government. Why do you think so many people from South America and from Mexico are coming from across the border?…Our government cannot resemble those governments in South America and Mexico. We must remain different and those people coming from the front door will help us do that.

Watch it:

Perhaps for the sake of sense of consistency, Beck has essentially drawn a line in the sand between immigrants who emigrate to the U.S. legally, and those who do not. Yet, what Beck either ignores or doesn’t realize is that the “front door” is slammed in the face of most people who would like to live and work in the U.S. Though working in the U.S. without authorization is, for most immigrants, an option of last resort, it’s often their only option. Numerical limits on green cards are outdated by over 20 years and are grossly insufficient. Diversity visas are only available to persons from countries with low rates of immigration to the U.S. — anyone from Mexico, China, the Philippines, India, and other countries with high levels of immigration is almost immediately disqualified. Most immigrants do not have the necessary family relationships to apply for legal entry through family sponsored immigration and fail to meet the strict refugee and asylum status criteria.

The kind of immigration reform the White House has endorsed seeks to fix many of those injustices and inefficiencies. However, according to Beck, progressives are simply trying to “dupe” immigrants with poor English skills who don’t understand their “radical” language. Beck also states that progressives would be “happy to welcome” immigrants with Marxist ideologies and “make them part of the fundamental transformation that they’re trying to bring about.”

President Obama is having a good week. Reports now indicate that the US and Russia have reached an agreement on a new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) that will replace the old treaty that expired last December. Thus, after signing into law his chief domestic priority, the President will soon sign a new START treaty (likely in Prague), thereby advancing his chief foreign policy priority and providing some justification to his awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize. The New York Times concludes:

The new treaty represents perhaps the most concrete foreign policy achievement for Mr. Obama since he took office 14 months ago and the most significant result of his effort to ‘reset’ the troubled relationship with Russia.

The new START treaty will reduce the number of nuclear weapons pointed at US cities and will enable the US to continue to be able to monitor Russia’s nuclear stockpiles. It will cut deployed strategic nuclear warheads from 2200 to about 1550 and will cut the total number of launchers from 1600 to 800. It will also ensure that the framework of the previous START treaty – a treaty that was the brain-child of Ronald Reagan and was advanced by President George H.W. Bush – is maintained.

In other words, this new START follow-on agreement will maintain the status quo and preserve nuclear stability, while making modest advances in reducing nuclear weapons. The significance of this treaty is that it lays the groundwork for more far-reaching talks between the US and Russia and will lay the groundwork for strengthening the nuclear non-proliferation regime, as this new agreement will allow both countries to show that they are keeping their end of the decades old nuclear bargain.

Despite this treaty having extensive bi-partisan support among senior foreign policy officials – such as George Schultz, Henry Kissinger, Richard Lugar (R-IN), Colin Powell –ratification is far from assured. There are real questions over whether the Senate GOP will seek to obstruct the ratification of the treaty. Treaties require a two-thirds majority, therefore eight or nine Republican votes are needed to ratify this treaty. If the Senate GOP wants to kill it they can. Therefore if ratification becomes a fight – it will not be a fight between Republicans and Obama, it will be a fight within the Republican caucus – between moderates and the far right.

In a sign of how extreme the GOP Senate leadership has become, Bloomberg reported, following word the treaty was done, that “Senate Republicans would object to linkages similar to the one in the 1991 treaty.” In other words, what was acceptable to Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, would not be acceptable to Senator Jon Kyl (R-AZ).

The only objection that Kyl’s staff could come up with is that the treaty contains irrelevant and entirely symbolic line about missile defense in the preamble to the treaty. Ryan Patmintra, a spokesman for Arizona Senator Jon Kyl, went on the record, insisting that “unilateral declarations that the Russian Federation could use as leverage against you or your successors when U.S. missile defense decisions are made.”

But this is all a ludicrous smokescreen. Even if there was no line about missile defense, Russia could still use missile defense as a reason to withdraw from the treaty, since every treaty has an out-clause and either country can use whatever justification they want to justify a withdrawal. Richard Lugar, the foremost arms-control expert in the Senate, also poured cold water on these claims:

Missile defense will not be part of the treaty, but in the preamble both parties will state their positions and there will be a mention of offense and defense and the importance of those…they are in essence editorial opinions.

If Kyl and the GOP leadership in the Senate end up killing the treaty, they will be sending the world into nuclear chaos. If treaty ratification fails it is not as if the current status quo simply continues. The old START treaty has expired and should ratification fail the informal agreement in which both the US and Russia adhere to the treaty, despite it not being in force, will end. In other words, Jon Kyl and the Senate GOP could be sending us into an age of nuclear anarchy in regards to US and Russian nuclear relations. It will also essentially kill the nuclear non-proliferation regime by betraying its basic bargain. While the Senate GOP leadership maybe so politically craven or so ideologically extreme that they are willing to endanger US national security in exchange for scoring a political defeat against the President, such reckless extremism can only be stopped by other more moderate members of the Senate GOP.

Gen. David Petraeus caused quite a stir last week with his written statement (pdf) to the Senate Armed Services Committee, in which he included “insufficient progress toward a comprehensive Middle East peace” as the first among “a number of cross-cutting issues that serve as major drivers of instability, inter-state tensions, and conflict” that “can serve as root causes of instability or as obstacles to security.”

While none of this is really surprising to anyone who has spent much time studying the Middle East, it does run afoul of one of the most treasured articles of faith of the neocons, which is the idea that the U.S.-Israel relationship exists is a sort of hermetically sealed bubble, separated from the U.S.’s other challenges in the region, generating no negative externalities for U.S. interests. For many Israel hawks, the idea that there is “linkage” between the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to other problems in the region is not only a myth, but espousing such ideas is quite enough to qualify one as “anti-Israel.”

In New Hampshire yesterday, Philip Klein of the American Spectator asked Gen. Petraeus to clarify his views. While Petraeus disapproved of the way that some of “the blogs” had presented his written statement, he ended up strongly re-affirming the substance of the linkage argument.

Saying that the written statement “describes the various factors that affect the strategic context in which we [CENTCOM] operate,” Petraeus told Klein that “the Middle East peace process — and whether there’s progress or is not progress — has a great deal to do with” that context. The lack of progress, Petraeus said, “is something that influences our area.”

Notably, Petraeus said that he thought that Secretary of State Clinton’s recent speech to AIPAC — in which Clinton strongly reiterated American support for Israel, but said that “new construction in East Jerusalem or the West Bank… undermines America’s unique ability to play a role in the peace process” — “articulately and clearly conveyed our policy.”

While denying both that he had requested, as Mark Perry originally reported, to have Israel-Palestine transferred into CENTCOM’s area of responsibility, and that he had made any specific reference to the stalled peace process endangering American lives, Petraeus affirmed that the lack of progress toward a resolution “does make situations more challenging, particularly for moderate leaders” in the Middle East:

If you go to moderate leaders in the Arab world, they will tell you that the lack of progress in the Middle East peace process causes them problems, because their concern is that those who promote violence in Gaza and the West Bank will claim that because there’s no progress diplomatically that the only way to get progress is through violence. And that’s their concern. And that was really what we were trying to convey.

That’s why we support Senator Mitchell so much. We have invited Senator Mitchell to every single conference that I have hosted — for ambassadors, for chiefs of defense staff, what have you, which we do about three times a year — because everyone is so keenly riveted on that issue even though, again, it is not in our area. And we keep an eye on it, because we need to know the atmospherics there because they do — there is a certain spillover effect.

“There is a certain spillover effect.” Ladies and gentlemen, the reality of linkage.

Petraeus also cited a blog post from Commentary’s Max Boot defending him from the charge of being “anti-Israel.” The irony, of course, is that the people who relentlessly caricature the linkage argument as “anti-Israel” are mainly the type of people who read and write for Commentary.

Yesterday on Heritage’s Blog, Baker Spring argued that a better way to eliminate nuclear weapons is to build a super awesome full proof missile defense system that makes it pointless for other countries to have nuclear weapons. He argues that instead of the multilateral arms-control approach pursued by the Obama administration, the US should:

pursue more fundamentally defensive strategic postures for the U.S. and other nations. This is the best option for keeping the world as far from the nuclear precipice as possible until it is clear that a world without nuclear weapons can be achieved.

As Kingston Reif and Travis Sharp point out Spring and others on the right:

recycle(s) a snake oil sales pitch that first emerged at the dawn of the Atomic Age. The illusion is that the awesome destructiveness of nuclear weapons can somehow be neutralized by a panacea—in this case impenetrable missile defenses.

This is pure and total fantasy.

First, back in the real world, despite two decades of massive amounts of investment, long range ballistic missile defense still doesn’t work as planned. The much flaunted successful “tests” of the ground based system in the US are largely staged. These are open book tests, where one knows the answers before hand – we know exactly where the missile will be and when and yet we can therefore sometimes hit it. Kingston Rief and Travis Sharp explain that “the technology required to intercept a large number of long-range missiles equipped with decoys and countermeasures does not exist and may never exist.” Technical problems are endemic. The head of the Missile Defense Agency even publicly vented his frustration this week. A New York Times editorial today notes:

Lt. Gen. Patrick O’Reilly, the program’s chief, told a conference on Monday that some contractors continue to produce poor quality components for missile interceptors… General O’Reilly said he is withholding a portion of the profits from contractors responsible for the shoddy work… If contractors know profits will be reduced if a missile test is unsuccessful, experts say this could create a strong incentive for them to ensure the tests are (falsely) successful by conducting more scripted, less realistic tests.

Second, the missile defense system that Baker Spring envisions would only lead to a destabilizing nuclear arms race. Even if technical problems were resolved in the ground based system, they still wouldn’t be able to protect against large number of missiles and would only serve to create incentives for countries to increase their nuclear stockpiles. In a remarkable article three Air Force scholars, one of whom heads the Strategic Plans and Policy Division, recently explained in reference to Asia that “nuclear defenses are a bad idea,” since it will only prompt China to build more nuclear weapons, something that it is not seeking to do. Any defensive system we develop will only spawn others to build new weapons to overcome it that is the history of warfare’s technological innovations.

Finally, Baker Spring simply cannot seem to understand why the Russians would not see US missile defense as in their interests. According to Spring, US missile defense is actually in Russia’s interests:

a U.S. strategic policy that pursues missile defenses may reflect a better understanding of Russia’s strategic interests than the Russian government itself appreciates.

His logical gumby is hard to follow. But Spring is essentially saying that the Russian state, like the Soviet Union before it, is seeking confrontation with the US, and so when we build our Jedi force field of freedom around the US, it will finally make those pesky Russians – who still have nukes threatening us (nevermind that we still threaten them with out nuclear arsenal) – realize that we are invincible and that they should simply bow down and kiss the ring of the United States and eliminate their nuclear weapons. Got that? One wonders how they have the gall to call Obama’s plan naïve, after writing such nonsense.

Unfortunately, bad ideas have consequences. Pursuing right wing missile defense plans, while at the very least would flush tens of billions of dollars down the toilet, would also serve to upset nuclear stability. Countries like Russia and China would rapidly expand their nuclear forces and the threat of nuclear terrorism – something no missile shield can protect against – would only worsen as proliferation dangers grow. While there is definitely a role for more proven short-range theater based missile defense, the notion of an impenetrable long range missile defense shield is not only exceptionally naive and fanciful, it is also destabilizing and dangerous.

The Arizona legislature is only a few steps away from passing a bill, HB 2632, that would allow police to arrest anyone who is in this country illegally and charge them with trespass. The bill, which was approved by the state House yesterday, would also require police to attempt to determine the immigration status of anyone they encounter as part of any “lawful contact,” outlaw the hiring of day laborers off the street, and prohibit anyone from knowingly transporting an undocumented immigrant for any reason. A nearly identical version of the bill was already approved by the Arizona Senate and is awaiting reconciliation with the House version.

If approved, HB 2632 will be the first bill of its type. The East Valley Tribune points out that “federal courts elsewhere have rejected similar laws from other states, saying only Congress can approve laws allowing the arrest of those who entered the country illegally.” However, the bill’s mastermind, state Sen. Russell Pearce (R-Mesa) seems confident that HB 2632 and its Senate counterpart, SB 1070, will be upheld if challenged.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Arizona disagrees. According to them, SB 1070 is downright unconstitutional. The ACLU recently released an analysis that goes through the bill and points out its constitutional flaws, section by section. In a nutshell:

This bill unconstitutionally allows the state of Arizona to regulate immigration by making any non-citizen who has entered the United States without permission guilty of the additional state crime of trespassing. It gives local police officers authority to investigate, detain and arrest people for perceived immigration violations without the benefit of proper training, exacerbating the problem of racial profiling and raising concerns about the prolonged detention of citizens and legal residents.

The ACLU also points out that the provision of the bill which grants police officers authority to conduct warrantless arrests of undocumented immigrants has already been deemed invalid by a decision involving a similar situation in the Ninth Circuit Court. The ACLU warns that the bill “subjects local governments to unreasonable and potentially frivolous litigation by private citizens with an anti-immigrant agenda” who don’t think local officials are complying with the bill.

Coconino County Sheriff Bill Pribil and others law enforcement officials have also slammed the bill. “At this point, I see it interesting on the one hand counties are being eviscerated by the state Legislature when it comes to budget … and yet they continue to find ways for us to spend our precious resources on programs we can’t support,” Pribil told the Arizona Daily Sun. “We’re going to continue to see these types of bills introduced throughout the country until the federal government can get its act together,” Pribil said. “It’s frustrating.”

The Arizona Republic reports that “lawmakers didn’t debate the bill’s merits before endorsing the measure.”

I’m in Tripoli, Libya for the next couple days to attend a conference on the terrorist deradicalization program run by the foundation of the heir apparent to Libyan dictator Muammar al-Qaddafi, Saif al-Islam al-Qaddafi. This conference is one part of a wider effort by Libya to come in from the cold that has been ongoing since late 2003, when Qaddafi agreed to end his nuclear and chemical weapons programs and abandon his support for terrorism.

Since then, the United States and Libya have slowly and fitfully normalized relations after decades of tension that included Libyan-sponsored terrorism (including the 1988 Lockerbie bombing) and repeated U.S. military action, especially in the 1980s. In fact, the Libya normalization represents one of the few genuine foreign policy successes of the Bush administration – a case of critical engagement with an adversary that cut against its ideological grain and paid off.

Libya’s rehabilitation over the past several years hasn’t stopped Qaddafi from continuing his erratic international behavior, including declaring a jihad against Switzerland, calling for a so-called ‘one-state solution’ to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and calling for a sectarian partition of Nigeria. This list of purely interstate imbroglios doesn’t include public relations disasters like Qaddafi’s bizarre, rambling speech at last year’s UN General Assembly, nor the disgusting hero’s welcome given to convicted Lockerbie bomber Abdel Baset al-Megrahi last August.

And despite the recent diplomatic opening to the West, Libya’s human rights record remains appalling, as documented in a recent Human Rights Watch report. The latest State Department country report on human rights states that the “government’s human rights record remains poor” and includes “disappearances; torture; arbitrary arrest… new restrictions on media freedom and continued to restrict freedom of expression.”

Saif al-Islam al-Qaddafi, whose foundation has conducted the de-radicalization program at the center of this conference, has cultivated an image of a reform-minded heir apparent. And while his foundation is one of the few entities in Libya able to challenge government repression, any proof of reform will have to be in the pudding – either as far as his father will let him push or as far as he wants to push should he succeed him.

The Libyan government obviously wants to cultivate the image of an opening Libya that has overcome its sordid past behavior. While its foreign policy has certainly changed, it remains to be seen whether or not its domestic policy can change or whether, as long-time regional observer Fred Halliday has argued, it will remain “a state of robbers, in formal terms a kleptocracy.”

I’ll post more updates as the conference continues.

Leaving aside his tiresome, and by now self-discrediting, reductio ad Chamberlinum argument, Alan Dershowitz’s op-ed in today’s Wall Street Journal is a useful reminder that his tendency toward dishonesty isn’t limited to the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He’s dishonest about Iran, too:

Regardless of his passage of health-care reform and regardless of whether he restores jobs and helps the economy recover, Mr. Obama will be remembered for allowing Iran to obtain nuclear weapons. History will not treat kindly any leader who allows so much power to be accumulated by the world’s first suicide nation — a nation whose leaders have not only expressed but, during the Iran-Iraq war, demonstrated a willingness to sacrifice millions of their own people to an apocalyptic mission of destruction.

Without downplaying the risks of a nuclear weapons-capable Iran, this is just nuts. Generally accepted estimates put war-related casualties for both sides in the Iran-Iraq war (a war initiated by Iraq, not an “apocalyptic mission of destruction” by Iran) at about one and a half million. I’m not sure where Dershowitz got the idea that Iran sacrificed “millions” of its own people. (Someone should probably check the footnotes of Joan Peters’ From Time Immemorial, just in case.)

While a million and a half casualties is certainly a tragedy, Global Security puts this in historical perspective:

Without diminishing the horror of either war, Iranian losses in the eight-year Iran-Iraq war appear modest compared with those of the European contestants in the four years of World War I, shedding some light on the limits of the Iranian tolerance for martyrdom. The war claimed at least 300,000 Iranian lives and injured more than 500,000, out of a total population which by the war’s end was nearly 60 million. During the Great War, German losses were over 1,700,000 killed and over 4,200,000 wounded [out of a total population of over 65 million]. Germany’s losses, relative to total national population, were at least five times higher than Iran. France suffered over 1,300,000 deaths and over 4,200,000 wounded. The percentages of pre-war population killed or wounded were 9% of Germany, 11% of France, and 8% of Great Britain.

And then, a few years later, Europe had another huge war, in which millions more people were killed. But the West is civilized, whereas in Iran they wear turbans.

As for Dershowitz’s repetition of the irretrievably stupid “Iran as suicide nation” talking point, this provides a good opportunity for me to cite my former colleague Andy Grotto’s recently published article, “Is Iran A Martyr State?.”

“The martyr state view rests on bold, even radical claims about Iran’s goals and behavior that defy conventional expectations of states’ actions,” Grotto writes, “but no government in recorded history has willfully pursued policies it knows will proximately cause its own destruction“:

Given the novelty of the martyr state argument, its major implications for policy, and how unequivocally its proponents present it, one would expect to encounter an avalanche of credible evidence.

Yet that is not the case. References are scarce in this line of writings, and certain references are cited with striking regularity.

Grotto determines that the “martyr state” view essentially rests upon a few neoconservative op-eds and a laughably shoddy report by a right-wing Israeli think tank, whose claims have been repeated again and again such that they now represent an article of faith for the “Bomb Iran” set.

The Iranian regime has demonstrated repeatedly that it’s primary goal is regime preservation. As Grotto writes, “there are vivid episodes in Iran’s history where it has confronted a clear choice between absolute fealty to religious ideals such as martyrdom and exporting the revolution, and regime survival,” such as its decision to accept a U.N.-brokered ceasefire in its “apocalyptic mission of destruction” war with Iraq.

“If and when Iran crosses the nuclear threshold,” Grotto concludes, “there is nothing inherent about the Islamic Republic to suggest that it cannot be deterred from using nuclear weapons or transferring them to its terrorist proxies.”

The main risk of a nuclear Iran is not religiously-motivated nuclear war, but the traditional-and very grave-problems posed by the spread of nuclear weapons, including regional arms races, crisis instability, miscalculation, and the fact that nuclear weapons would reduce the ability of Israel and the United States to project conventional military power over it.

In other words, the prospect of a nuclear weapons-capable Iran is troubling enough without bringing in hysterical claims about it being a “suicide nation.”

This past weekend, 200,000 people representing a broad coalition of labor, faith, progressives, and conservatives peacefully marched on the National Mall in support of comprehensive immigration reform. Roy Beck, director of the anti-immigrant group NumbersUSA, decided to bring himself, his cameras, and his bodyguards to the march as part of his organization’s counter campaign, S.T.O.P. Amnesty in 4 Days.

Robert Erickson, an activist from Minneapolis, was one of the demonstrators who Beck interviewed. Erickson satirically presented himself as a sympathetic activist concerned about “European illegal immigration.” By employing the charged rhetoric of immigration restrictionists, Erickson successfully engaged Beck in an extended conversation that highlighted the hypocrisy and inconsistencies that encompass the anti-immigrant movement. He even riled Beck up about the supposed dangers of “illegal European immigration” that date back to the days of Columbus:

ERICKSON: I want to say that illegal European immigration is one of the worst things we have going in this country. It’s not a new problem, it’s been going on for hundreds of years. Illegal European immigrants have committed some of the worst crimes in history, including slavery, genocide, and theft of indigenous lands. Have you thought about this at all Roy?

BECK: Yeah, in fact, our very open immigration system in the 1880s and 1890s very much helped finish off the Indians in terms of pushing them into the reservations…

ERICKSON: Colombus go home?

BECK: Ok. [...]

ERICKSON: I’m not sure if E-verify is enough, when we’re talking about murder…

BECK: Now you’re into the organized crime. You are exactly right. Some of the worst organized crime in this country are white Europeans.

Watch it:

At first, Beck appeared happy to find someone who he thought was a like-minded supporter. Rather than realizing that the joke was on him, Beck seemed intent on trying to find some common ground with Erickson. While condemning the actions of European explorers like Columbus, Beck goes out of his way to draw an implicit parallel when he points out that “They [Native Americans] got overrun, they lost their country, they lost their land, they lost their societies, and, for the most part, they lost their culture…No nation should allow themselves for that to happen.” Several minutes into the interview, once Beck realizes that Erickson is sarcastically advocating the deportation of all white Europeans, Beck brings the conversation to an embarrassing halt.

Last fall, Erickson managed to get on the speaking list of an anti-immigrant tea party protest. Erickson orated on the perils of illegal European immigration and led a crowd of counter-protesters in his chants of “Columbus go home!” and “Europeans out!”

Speaking to thousands of attendees at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s (AIPAC) gala dinner last night, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu offered this response to the Obama administration’s request that Israel halt settlement expansion on occupied territory in and around Jerusalem:

The Jewish people were building Jerusalem 3,000 year ago and the Jewish people are building Jerusalem today. Jerusalem is not a settlement. It is our capital.

Watch it (Jerusalem comments begin at 8:05):

The AIPAC audience responded to this with two rounds of applause that went on for over a minute.

It’s quite true that Jerusalem is not a settlement. It is an ancient city to which both the Jewish and Palestinian people have legitimate historic claims. But while Jerusalem itself is not a settlement, it is ringed by settlements, such as the now-infamous Ramat Shlomo, built by Israel for the specific purpose of consolidating Israeli control of the city and cutting off future Palestinian access. Arab neighborhoods of occupied East Jerusalem, such as Sheikh Jarrah and Silwan, are also deeply infiltrated by settlements, for the same purpose: To embed Israel in all areas of the city, and to re-engineer its demographic character in order to preclude its division under future negotiations.

How can Israel continue to flout both international law and its own U.S.-brokered agreements at no immediate cost? Listen to that wild applause again.

Interestingly, Netanyahu also offered a veiled rebuke to Gen. David Petraeus, who last week told the Senate Armed Services Committee (pdf) that the Israel-Palestinian conflict “foments anti-American sentiment, due to a perception of US favoritism for Israel,” and that “Arab anger over the Palestinian question limits the strength and depth of US partnerships with governments and peoples” in the Middle East.

Implicitly rejecting this analysis, Netanyahu insisted that “Our soldiers and your soldiers fight against fanatic enemies that loathe our common values”:

In the eyes of these fanatics, we are you and you are us. To them, the only difference is that you are big and we are small, you are the Great Satan and we are the Little Satan. This fanaticism’s hatred of Western civilization predates Israel’s establishment by over one thousand years. Militant Islam does not hate the West because of Israel. It hates Israel because of the West, because it sees Israel as an outpost of freedom that prevents them from overrunning the Middle East. When Israel stands against its enemies, it stands against America’s enemies.

The idea that “Israel’s war is America’s war” is a long-time favorite of the neocons. Which is to say that it’s a politically useful fiction that will end up getting lots of Americans killed. Sure, many Islamic extremists who hate Israel hate America too, but casting the various Islamist groups and movements of the Middle East together under the heading “these fanatics,” and asserting that we’re involved in a war of civilizations that “predates Israel’s establishment by over one thousand years,” is not only analytically sloppy, but a pretty transparent attempt to absolve Israel for policies and behaviors that drive extremism and undercut American credibility.

Today, grassroots activists from the Fair Immigration Reform Movement (FIRM) staged a sit-in and rally at the Republican National Committee offices to demand a meeting with Chairman Michael Steele. Within 20 minutes, Steele agreed to schedule a meeting with the demonstrators on March 31st.

Meanwhile, on Fox News today, Steele implied that he’s been meeting with activists for the past seven to eight months — which seems hard to believe given the fact that FIRM advocates felt the need to stake out the offices of RNC headquarters in order to get the chairman to agree to a meeting. Nevertheless, Steele did indicate that he’s concerned about the way his party has presented itself on the immigration issue and affirmed that the GOP is a Party of assimilation and apple pie:

I have been having discussions with leadership and with activist groups around the country on the immigration issue now for about seven or eight months. I have been very concerned about how we are positioned rhetorically, as well as from a political and policy side to make sure that we are working with our leadership on the hill and activists on the ground.

We are the Party of assimilation. We are the Party that has always stood for welcoming people. We got away from that in 06 and 08 and paid a dear price for it as you know. We shouldn’t be in the business of alienating Americans, but welcoming them. And showing that this is the process that’s expected to come here. This is the door you come through, the paper you fill out. Have a piece of apple pie, sing the star-spangled banner and get to work.

Watch it:

Advocates are probably eager to meet with Steele on the more specific issue of finding another Republican co-sponsor for comprehensive immigration reform. Currently, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) is the lone Republican working on an immigration reform bill with Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY). Graham has repeatedly stated that will not allow the bill to be brought to the floor unless they can find another Republican co-sponsor. GOP volunteers haven’t exactly been forthcoming and FIRM is likely planning on lighting a fire under Steele. “The Republican Party must reject the obstructionist tactics that are alienating mainstream Americans and killing any hopes for a larger, more diverse party in the future,” states FIRM in its press release.

Though Steele is certainly seeking to soften the rhetoric of the Republican Party on immigration, it’s unclear if gentler words will lead to any action. Back in 2008, Steele affirmed that there would be no change in the Republican Party’s enforcement-only platform when it comes to immigration. According to Steele, at the time, “the GOP’s position on immigration is very much the position of many, many Hispanics who are in this country.” When polled, 87% of Latino voters said they would not vote for a congressional candidate who supported deportation policies.